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Updated: June 11, 2025
Now I can not but wonder that so much stress should be laid on the circumstance of inconceivableness, when there is such ample experience to show, that our capacity or incapacity of conceiving a thing has very little to do with the possibility of the thing in itself; but is in truth very much an affair of accident, and depends on the past history and habits of our own minds.
Will it really be contended that the inconceivableness of the thing, in such circumstances, proves anything against the experimental origin of the conviction? Is it not clear that in whichever mode our belief in the proposition may have originated, the impossibility of our conceiving the negative of it must, on either hypothesis, be the same? As, then, Dr.
Now I cannot but wonder that so much stress should be laid on the circumstance of inconceivableness, when there is such ample experience to show, that our capacity or incapacity of conceiving a thing has very little to do with the possibility of the thing in itself; but is in truth very much an affair of accident, and depends on the past history and habits of our own minds.
The positive argument is, that every such belief represents the aggregate of all past experience. “Conceding the entire truth of” the “position, that during any phase of human progress, the ability or inability to form a specific conception wholly depends on the experiences men have had; and that, by a widening of their experiences, they may, by and by, be enabled to conceive things before inconceivable to them, it may still be argued that as, at any time, the best warrant men can have for a belief is the perfect agreement of all pre-existing experience in support of it, it follows that, at any time, the inconceivableness of its negation is the deepest test any belief admits of.... Objective facts are ever impressing themselves upon us; our experience is a register of these objective facts; and the inconceivableness of a thing implies that it is wholly at variance with the register.
An unfair way which some men take with themselves: who, because of the inconceivableness of something they find in one, throw themselves violently into the contrary hypothesis, though altogether as unintelligible to an unbiassed understanding.
After so complete an admission that inconceivableness is an accidental thing, not inherent in the phenomenon itself, but dependent on the mental history of the person who tries to conceive it, how can he ever call upon us to reject a proposition as impossible on no other ground than its inconceivableness?
By inconceivableness is sometimes meant, inability to form or get rid of an idea; sometimes, inability to form or get rid of a belief. The former meaning is the most conformable to the analogy of language; for a conception always means an idea, and never a belief.
But occasional failure, he says, is incident to all tests. If such failure vitiates “the test of inconceivableness,” it “must similarly vitiate all tests whatever. We consider an inference logically drawn from established premises to be true. Yet in millions of cases men have been wrong in the inferences they have thought thus drawn.
We have by no means the wish to avoid difficulties which meet us, when trying to bring miracles, and especially the specific and pregnant miracles of the history of salvation, into harmony with our scientific knowledge of the world: only we can no longer admit that these difficulties consist in the inconceivableness or in the supernaturalism of miracles.
Spencer agrees with me in considering axioms to be “simply our earliest inductions from experience.” But he differs from me “widely as to the worth of the test of inconceivableness.” He thinks that it is the ultimate test of all beliefs. He arrives at this conclusion by two steps.
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